AT FIRST it seems straightforward. After a brief inspection of its genitals, a baby is assigned a gender.
But look more closely, and this simple idea begins to unravel. For a start, biological sex isn’t always clear-cut. Around 1 in 2000 people are born intersex, with reproductive organs or sexual anatomy that don’t fit the typical male/female pattern.
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Beyond biological sex, gender as a concept is also tough to pin down. The term originates from the Latin word genus, meaning “type” or “kind”. Before the 1950s, it was only really used to describe different classes of nouns in certain languages. It acquired a new meaning largely due to sexologist John Money, whose work with people who are intersex led him to distinguish between a person’s sex, as determined by genes and hormones, and their gender. For him, gender meant the social, psychological and behavioural aspects of being male or female. In the 1970s, work by feminist anthropologist Gayle Rubin helped to morph this into the idea of gender as a social construct, a socially imposed division of the sexes.
Today, the terms “gender” and “sex” are often used interchangeably, and for many people they are synonymous – someone is born female and identifies as a woman, for instance. But some people, often from a young age, have a strong sense of being a different gender to the sex they were designated at birth: a study in 2016 concluded that 0.6 per cent of US adults identify as transgender. Some people don’t identify as either gender.
The extent to which this gender identity – our internal sense of being male, female, neither or both – is down to nature or nurture is a hot research topic, and dominates much of today’s thinking about gender more generally. How much of, say, men’s supposed talent for engineering is down to biological factors such as a male fetus experiencing a surge of testosterone in the uterus, and how much is due to societal conditioning?
Studies often show that things regarded as biological facts of life aren’t straightforward. Take the idea that boys are more active than girls, and that girls are better talkers than boys. , a biologist specialising in gender development who recently retired from Brown University, Rhode Island, has shown that mothers engage male babies in more physical activity than girls, and talk more to their daughters than their sons. “Mothers are bringing a social sense of gender into the way they play with their babies, and this affects the development of the baby’s nervous system,” she says.
In the same bucket
Clear biological boundaries between men and women are difficult to define, as the International Association of Athletics Federations discovered following the case of Caster Semenya, a female South African runner with unusually high testosterone levels who won the 800 metres world title in 2009. There is also no clear distinction between male and female brains. “Whatever brain measure we look at – structure, connections, activity – there is way more overlap than difference between male and female brains,” says neuroscientist at Rosalind Franklin University of Medicine and Science in Chicago.
So perhaps it is time to ditch binary thinking about gender. “Gender differences fall on a continuum, not into two separate buckets,” says Fausto-Sterling.
This article appeared in print under the headline “How to think about… Gender”
